When I taught high school, one of my mantras to my history classes, as they learned to write essays and research papers, was "Assume Nothing."
And even though it was true then, and remains true today as a rule of nonfiction writing, I seem to have broken it.  I’m embarrassed to say that I fell into one of Washington’s biggest flytraps: whether out of hubris or laziness, I used an acronym where an actual name would make what I said more understandable to all (and that, folks, is after all, what we’re about).  The offending usage: NSPS.
Last night I got an email asking:  what the heck is NSPS?  I was taken aback, but stopped to think about it and realized that a program geared to only two agencies could well fly under the screen of hundreds of thousands of readers. 
So, for those of you who also wondered about NSPS (the number one issue of interest on The Forum), but were too embarrassed to ask, here’s a biased primer, straight off a DOD Web site:
(http://www.cpms.osd.mil/nsps/faqs.html)

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